The diary of a dedicated Ubuntu user that lucked into his dream job working on the Ubuntu team.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Goals for Week starting March 9th

First, a little rant - what is the deal with U.S. We don't have the metric system, and our daylight savings dates are totally different than the rest of the world. It's as if we want to be hard to work with.

In the meantime, I am finished with my week of using Kubuntu. Overall, I found it to be a very rich experience. It has really complete desktop functionality. It is certainly a lot "shinier" than GNOME. The KDE folks never miss an opportunity to animate something or make it semi-transparent. The applications are a lot more "power user" focused than GNOME apps. This added a bit more of an initial learning time, though in the end, with a few exceptions, GNOME has the same power user features, you just don't have to learn them before you get started.

Quassel is an example where it was a little harder to get started, but for IRC it had more functionality than Pidgin. For example, it automatically loaded up all the previous chat content that was collected the last time you were online into the buffer automatically. It also drew a line to show where you were when you last looked at the buffer, so it was easy to see what you missed since you last checked in.

So, onto goals for this week:

Get a PPA set up for pm-dashboard. I spent hours on this over the weekend, and got close, but I need some more time to focus on it. After I get it working, I will ask pitti to review my packaging. In general, I think the PPA functionality is awesome, just incredibly hard to access. This needs to be fixed, as we are missing a lot of opporutnity for developers to innovate on the platform by making it so hard for them to deploy even simple apps onto it.

9.10 planning meetings. Organize and attend.

Orgainze thoughts and people around the whole Ubuntu translation system. Also a topic for UDS.

Meet more people in the KDE/Kubuntu community.

A couple of blog posts.

Do a scrub of the Ubuntu desktop (Jaunty Alpha 5) and look for fit and finish issues that should be addressed before visual freeze/beta.

Help pitti ensure that notify-osd and the messaging indicator are working perfectly on Ubuntu.